tom willerer . com

Brainstorm: ways to improve “tumblr explore”

As I’ve become more and more hooked on tumblr as my place online to share thoughts, ideas, pictures, critiques, etc., I’ve also been finding myself more and more interested in finding other tumblelogs that I might find interesting, which has led me to the tumblr explore page.

The tumblr explore page is divided into 5 sections:

1. New Posts - a section showing the number of new posts thus far, with 18 icons of posts that contain pictures.  (This section seems too random to be useful)
2. On Our Radar - presumably this is a staff curated section of some of their favorite posts of the day.  (This is interesting, but has nothing to do with me at all as it’s all about an anonymous editor with no justification as to why it was posted).
3. Browse - this section is basically a directory with 6 categories: staff picks, music, arts & artists, sweet themes, the tumblettes, and on our radar.  (This could be useful if there were more categories, especially ones that focused on the type of content typically posted).
4. The Tumblverse - a visual representation of current posts overlaid on a map.  (I wish it weren’t so much work to find tumblrs near me using this functionality)
5. Into Your Music - this section is very confusing to me.  It categorizes 9 tumblelogs based on a particular artist, say Sufjan Stevens, but then when I click through there is no music posted by that artist (and sometimes at all).

So, in my opinion, this page has a lot of room for improvement, and I’d like to offer up a few new ideas in hopes of sparking more ideas from all the people that read this blog.

• Dashboard: I would love to have a dashboard with basic stats such as number of followers, number of posts, average posts per day / week / month, # of posts liked or rebloged.
• Top 10: “liked” posts of the day, “rebloged” posts of the day, most obscure, and closest to you (both geographically and based on content)
• Tumble Like This: I would love to be able to read a post and then click “Find more like this” which would then provide me a list of similar posts / tumblelogs.

I’m sure there are better and more useful ways to improve the tumblr explore page, so please reblog this post or leave a comment with your suggestions and who knows, maybe this post will make it on to the tumblr explore page.

• Microblogging services Tumblr raises $4.5M more
• Twitter + Blogs = TwitBlogs!
• Tumlbr Raises $5M, To Start Selling ‘Sexy’ Things [David Karp]

Notes